China

Abstract

With a population of 1,362 million in 2013, China has achieved impressive progress in its economic development since the adoption of market-oriented reform in the late 1970s. Over the past three decades, China’s real GDP grew at an average annual rate of 10 per cent — the fastest economic growth in history (ILO 2014, 55). Reaching a GDP of USD 9.2 trillion in 2013, China became the second largest economy in the world, though its scale was still considerably smaller than that of the US economy (USD 16.8 trillion). As China’s economy has relied heavily on foreign trade, it is not surprising that currently the country is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter of goods and the second largest importer. Although these facts and figures may be breathtaking, it is still an upper-middle-ranked country measured in terms of income per capita. In 2013, China’s GDP per capita of USD 6,807 ranked 90th in the world, although in 2012, 128 million of its people still lived below the national poverty line of RMB 2,300 per year (about USD 1.80 a day), which meant that after India, China had the second largest number of poor people in the world (see World Bank country data/China website¹).